If the reader knows who the film character included in the title of this article is, they must be of a respectable age, or of some general culture, or both. If he remembers and continues to impact her (every infinite time she contemplates him), the backlight of the final shot of desert centaurs (The Searchers by John Ford, 1956), as a perfect melting pot of loneliness, raw hardness and savage existential sensibility, don’t hesitate…according to the untouchable current criteria You suffer from toxic masculinity and you should go to a re-education course to be able to continue living in society.
I consider myself a good reader and I strive to reconcile operational life with leisure and training, avoiding the accumulation of copies that inevitably come together with the weekly cinema appointment, the viewing of worthwhile series, what may fall from the theater and the review of a DVD from my physical collection, (yes… I am an analog being, I confess it with pride). Out of respect for the work developed in any cultural creation, I always finish a book (or a movie), although sometimes it slows down due to the length of the text, the density of the language, the need for translation or the consultation of concepts. However, in some cases it just chokes me, especially when it touches an internal fiber through the ignoble imposition of an easy and dogmatic discourse, an increasingly widespread custom.
I was in that about four months ago when the title attracted me John Wayne you are in heaven. Masculinities, cinema and feminism, written by Octavio Salazar Benítez with a prologue by Leticia Dolera. Without prejudice or knowledge about the first, he did identify the actress, director and screenwriter with the series Perfect life as a good mix of criticism, self-analysis and emotional smile from the perspective of three women who are just trying to find a way out of their lives. Two seasons with a good point of expository balance and human dissection that could be contrasted with the occasional statement or controversy of the author.
Going back to the truncated reading of the text (which I managed to finalize recently), at first it suggested added interest to me because it was structured based on small reflections on different films with the common nexus of masculinity, but as soon as it progressed in its paragraphs the only thing that warned was a tiresome and inquisitorial soniquette about realities that are true, but also about all the critical topics towards the figure of the current heterosexual cisgender. If we add the questionable epithet “white” to the latter, we are faced with a generalized guilt almost of original sin, which is built on the basis of a Macedonian of stigmatizing neologism with terms such as deconstruction, omnipotence, forgetfulness, homophobia, egocentrism, domination, heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, androcentrism or objectification… to name a few.
Of all the films and authors or characters analyzed, the ratings for three of my favorite works are strident and hurtful: Irrational Man seen as “flawed manhood” (actually directly accusing Woody Allen of “misogyny and male supremacy”), shame as “battered masculinity…prisoner of itself”, and Another round focused on “showing educational spaces that are reflections of false equality”. We must have watched different movies or the weight of my inherent toxicity makes me see those characters for their values, regardless of their attributes. (literally). I am passionate about what I suppose are stereotypes of heterosexual imposition such as Rick in White House, kurtz either Willard in Apocalypse NowAhab in Moby Dick, Armand d’Hubert of The Duelists, Pike Bishop in Wild Bunch, Ransom Stoddard or Tom Doniphon in it The Man Who Killed Liberty Balance…but with the same intensity and the same range of idealization they also move me Alex Y monica in Fiction, pauline Y Jean in Saint-Pierre’s widow, Justine Y Claire in Melancholy, Thomas Edward Lawrence in lawrence of arabia either James Whale in Gods and Monsters… In case it’s not clear, I learn values and admire them as references to human beings or characters, whatever their genitalia or who they decide to share a bed with.
Put to personal confessions about the conformation of masculine identity and to serve as preventive exculpation, my childhood and adolescence in Seville in the 70s and 80s was not exactly idyllic. What today is already defined as bullying falls short of a time when some of us received physical, intimidating or even sexual violence in single-gender school environments, with that terrible internalized silence of prison discipline that reigned among students and teachers. Add to this the traumatic experience of the constant assault on the street by delinquent kids who were not educated or the dogmatism of the repressive and obscurantist religiosity of the moment, and I don’t know if in retrospect I came out of that stage with a moderately healthy sexuality or emotional and lasting stability. . It probably drags defects, but I am clear that the cinema was not, nor is it the worst of my influences, quite the opposite.
I’m sorry, but a certain kind of racism, androphobia or misandry is incurred if it is affirmed by default that the heterosexual white man is the repository of evil. It would be the same outrage as identifying Nazism with being German, that greed is Jewish, or stealing with being a Gypsy. In this sense and for what affects the creative field, inspiring freedom should be compared with weighted assessment, and everything in turn connected with the escape valve that constitutes healthy transgression or self-affirmation of one’s own identity as each one/ a/* want to see it. The models of masculinity that we call traditional must be judged in their moral vision to the extent that they incur in profane machismo or unjustifiable violence, but there should be no fear of artistic drifts where humor and ingenuity move the ground that we all walk on.
I applaud even the hooligan advertising of series like Alpha Males (created by Laura and Alberto Caballero), because it is A whole breath of fresh air that distributes tow to all Christ, from machirulo concepts to post-feminism that has stopped. His characters are built, dismantled and re-dissected in a crisis that is more common than particular, because we are all traveling in the same boat in these stormy and unsettled times. To exemplify by way of conclusions… I think it is unnecessary a time and ways that make Paco León apologize for scenes “reconsidered as rape” in the great Kikiorders to remove a wine label for pure almost puritanical Talibanism (Too much heart), or generates self-revisionism-censorship in conversation with her own graphic work (Raquel Córcoles). Perhaps this new political caste really sins of childish arrogance (recent qualifier and foreign to me), and perhaps You should review your principles and attitudes at times coercively gratuitous, if what is pursued is a more just and egalitarian world, of course.